


No Good Deed

by DracoMaleficium



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Discworld AU, Drabble, General Doom and Gloom, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Night Watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-31
Packaged: 2018-03-17 17:05:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3537314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoMaleficium/pseuds/DracoMaleficium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Jee was drunk. That's nothing new.</p><p>Captain Jee saved a mysterious homeless boy from the clutches of the Thieves' Guild. That <i>is</i> new. </p><p>And there <i>will</i> be consequences, because in Ankh-Morpork as ruled by Patrician Ozai, no good deed ever does go unpunished.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been thinking about this AU for a while, and talked it over with the wonderful Nele several times before. I suppose the crushing news of Terry Pratchett's death gave me the kick to finally write something for it.
> 
> It's not much, but I can't think of anything more fitting right now. 
> 
> Borrowing Nele's OCs from "People in the mirror" again, with her kind permission.

They stood by the cot. They stared.

“Nasty business, that, sir,” said Corporal Shi.

“Yeah,” said Jee, and tipped back the bottle of Bearhugger’s again.

They stood by the cot. They stared. 

The curled-up ball of boy on the cot coughed once, twice, and shrunk in on himself even more, pressing the bandaged mess of his right hand to his chest as though that could make a difference if anyone here truly wanted to hurt him. The bruises, old and new, flashed in dark color against his sickly white skin, some of them eating up other bruises. 

Jee took another sip. The amber haze tried to blur the edges off his sobriety, but only succeeded in making them starker. Ye gods. 

“Are we keeping him then, Captain?” asked the corporal.

Sergeant Haisu, who had more years of reading Jee and his moods under his belt, gently shook his head. “I’ll go look for more blankets,” he said firmly. 

Jee listened to the thunder of his boots decisively hitting the creaky wooden steps, looked at the ruin of a boy curled up in the corner of his office, and took another sip. The whisky sloshed enticingly, but this time it was an empty promise. He’d need at least two more bottles to even start forgetting the way he’d felt when they – 

The Guilds. Ha. Jee drank a bitter toast to the Thieves’ Guild's finest and silently congratulated Lord Ozai on the idea. So neat. So efficient. And fuck any poor sod who accidentally got himself stuck in the cogs, like this poor bugger currently passed out on the straw on Jee's floor. 

“Did they really…?” the corporal asked. The three dots hung expectantly in the air. Jee swallowed.

“They were about to cut his fingers off.” _For a start_. 

“For being –“

“An unlicensed thief, I imagine.”

“So he’s the kid that’s been going around pickpocketing and rummaging in dumpsters, yeah? The one who they said stayed at Jun’s… establishment… for a bit?”

“I think so.” They had no proof, only coincidences that just kept piling up.

A kid found in the Shades. A new guest with the seamstresses. A child the Thieves’ Guild was looking for, to administer their very special brand of justice, because while the guilds were many things, sporting was not one of them. There was a good reason why there was only ever one of each.

If Jee hadn’t stumbled across them in the Shades in time, the kid would have lost a lot more than just the tips of his fingers…

Or half his face. But then again, that injury looked older. If they’d burnt him earlier tonight, it would have looked a lot more… oozy. As it was, the burn was already scarring, if nastily, so someone must have exercised their own justice even before the Guild got to the child. 

Jee’s fingers itched against the glass. He put the bottle down on the desk, carefully, before he could send it flying into the wooden wall of his office. The Watch House was old and might not survive another one of Jee’s more violent fits. 

Anyway, he’d saved the kid. Gods only knew how, but something about him must have given the thieves second thoughts. Not for long, Jee was sure. 

He’d have to reinstall the traps in the privy.

“There were no blankets, Captain,” said Sergeant Haisu, coming back up with a determined air about him, “but I found this in the stable. Must have got left behind when they took Gertie away. There’s fleas on it but it should be warm enough for now.”

Jee nodded and stepped aside to let Haisu put the moth-eaten, dirty, smelly bit of fabric over their miserable guest. The boy coughed again and screwed his eyes shut more tightly, but at least he stopped shivering. Haisu ran a contemplative hand over the kid’s dirty black hair and stepped aside. The tight corners of his mouth meant he was biting his cheeks on the inside, looking just as angry as Jee felt.

“He’ll stay here for the night,” Jee decided. His voice seemed cottony even to his own ears, and gods, he needed to be drunk again. 

“Yes, sir.” Haisu shifted his weight from right foot to the left, making the old floorboards squeak. “I’ll go and see if Doctor Wu is in. She might have… something.”

He trailed off. No one wanted to say aloud that they had no idea what the something could even be, in the kid’s wretched state.

They stood around the cot. They stared.

“What’s his name?” Shi asked quietly.

“Zuko,” Jee said. The word tasted sour. “He told me his name was Zuko before he –“

He looked down at his feet and clenched his fist.

They stood around the cot. They stared.

“Okay, well, I’ll go,” Haisu decided.

“I’ll come with you,” Shi offered, a little too eagerly. 

Not that jee could blame him. He wouldn’t want to be left alone with himself right now, either. Didn’t. The bottle of Bearhugger’s was looking just a little too amber, just a little too bright for comfort, and the darkness gnawing at the edges felt just a little too strong. 

Jee said nothing as they left, just stood there and watched the kid a bit more. 

Then he walked around the desk and slumped down in the rickety chair, and pushed himself back, and kept staring, fingers tight around his truncheon. He didn’t know much about fate, or destiny, or other such rot – it was not the copper’s place to think about any of that or he wouldn’t be a copper for very long. But he could, sometimes, sense that peculiar little something, a shift, a spark in the air, a tightening somewhere deep in his gut, that told him that whatever was happening would impact the rest of his life. It had been there when Patrician Ozai had established the guilds; it had been there when he’d first held his badge in his hand; it had been there when he’d first woken up in the gutter with a memory-shaped hole in his head and a taste of dead rat in his mouth. 

He didn’t know why he was feeling it now, but he _was_ , so he kicked back and reached for the bottle again, and kept watch while the bundle of boy on the bed of straw wheezed and coughed and breathed and moaned quietly in pain. 

_You saved a life tonight_ , said a voice in Jee’s head. It sounded like his younger self.

So, as usual, Jee did his best to drink it quiet, because there was no place for his younger self anywhere in this Watch House, or on the streets of Ankh-Morpork, and certainly not in the Night Watch. He’d learned that the hard way, many, many years ago, and it was best for everyone involved if the lesson stuck. 

By the time Haisu and Shi came back with Doctor Wu in tow, the bottle was empty.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out I am writing more after all. Figures.
> 
> Many thanks to Nele for the brainstorming!

“What is this place?”

Jee looked up. A tousled, bleary, ash-grey face was peeking up at him from the bed of straw, one hand clinging to the edge of the blankets Haisu had found and bringing them up to the nose. Jee couldn’t see the injured hand.

He shifted in his chair and put down the report he’d been not-writing.

“You’re with the Night Watch,” he said, careful to hold eye-contact.

The grey face went grayer. “I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s why you’re up here, enjoying the most luxurious accommodations we can offer, instead of down in the cells.” Jee folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward. “Anyway, that’s not exactly true, is it?” he whispered. “You’ve been thieving.”

“I – “

“But, luckily for you, you’re with the _Night_ Watch,” Jee repeated. “We’re not gonna arrest you, lad. Gods know the last bugger we actually did arrest wandered into our cells on his own because he was drunk off his ass and his wife kicked him out and he wanted a warm place to sleep for the night. We’ve been charging him rent, actually, so that’s worked out all right. You’re _fine_.”

Only of course he wasn’t. But Jee wasn’t going to bring that up while he had a pair of scared, red-rimmed, glassy mismatched eyes staring up at him as though expecting Jee to lunge, fists swinging, any second now. 

Ye gods.

Jee ran a helpless hand over his face, rubbed his eye for a moment and then tried to address the scared boy again, sounding a little less like an angry cynical tit this time.

“I’m captain Jee,” he said. “I, er… I had a doctor look at your hand while you were out of it. It should… heal.”

“My hand,” the boy repeated. 

“Yes.” Oh blast it, didn’t he remember? Was Jee supposed to remind him that he’d been subjected to the Thieves’ Guild’s finest and oldest traditions? Fan-fucking-tastic, cheers, world. Jee would raise a bottle in toast if he hadn’t drunk them all already. “The Guild, they… how much do you remember?” he asked.

“They cut my fingers,” said the boy slowly. 

Jee closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his hands. “Just the tips,” he said hoarsely. 

“They kicked me and beat me and they cut my fingers and said they were going to do more than that so I would never steal without a license again.”

“The Guilds make their own laws,” Jee whispered. _And what a great way to render policemen basically useless_ , his thoughts added. 

The boy looked down. Jee imagined he was examining his bandaged right hand. 

“What happened?” he asked.

Right. Right. 

“I – interrupted,” Jee explained softly. “I was… on a beat nearby. Patrolling.” _Stumbling home roaring drunk and losing my way in the fog_. “I heard you, and I… decided to help.”

The red eyes blinked. Jee still couldn’t see any more of the boy’s face. “Why?”

Ha. Why indeed. Once again Jee’s fingers itched for the cool weight of the bottle in his hands, but since he had none, he had nowhere to hide from the simple truth: he had no bloody idea.

Nothing had been right about that night. Not his head, not the city, and certainly not the stubborn sobriety that had dug its claws into to him and held on no matter how much alcohol he’d poured into himself at the Bunch of Grapes. The many clocks scattered around the city had been chiming 4 o’clock in the morning by the time he’d finally given up to stumble along somewhere he could collapse for the rest of his shift, and something – his anger, probably – had steered his feet into the Shades.

He did that sometimes, when his ever-present anger took on that sharp edge of a knife ready to slice. It was always easy to find something to slice at in the Shades. Normal people didn’t go there unless they absolutely had to, and few of them ever made it out, because in the Shades, if you didn’t strike first you were as good as gone. The Watch hardly ever investigated the bodies the Ankh generously bubbled up in that area, and usually classified such cases as “suicide” and left it at that. This way was better for everyone involved.

Jee had grown up in the Shades. Cockbill Street, to be exact, which was the sort of place that had five families per room, but stoops so clean you could use them as mirrors because if you had absolutely nothing then, by gods, at least you had your pride. He had spent his careless boyhood switching between street gangs, just trying to stay afloat, because if you didn’t belong to a gang you were the one all the other gangs hunted. He’d spent so much time stumbling along these dark grimy streets that he could feel where he was just by the feel of the cobbles under the paper-thin soles of his boots. 

And that, during those darker, anger-sharp nights, was a problem. Because everyone here knew him, and knew he wasn’t worth the trouble. In a place where they would cheerfully murder a bloke for a dollar in his pocket, Jee usually carried most of his dollars in liquid form in his belly, so he had nothing worth stealing. They left him alone, and mostly just stepped over him when they happened to trip over him in the gutter, and Jee had nothing to let that anger out on.

It was firm Watch policy to run the other way whenever one heard screaming in the night. 

But Jee had been hurting, and he’d been drinking all night and had still felt disgustingly sober, and he’d been dying for an excuse to just let it all out, so when he’d heard screaming that night he’d run towards it for the first time in nearly five years.

And he’d found Bonny Lad, Knuckle-Duster, Mack the Sweeper, Beg-Me Johnny and Pretty Alice, all certified Thieves’ Guild thugs and go-to enforcers of its swift and strict “no unlicensed thieving” rule, two of them holding up a bruised, bloodied little boy while Alice was busy slicing off the tip of his pale, dirty thumb. 

The thing was, Jee was no hero. He was probably so far gone on the decent human being spectrum he was approaching Hero from the other side. But he had been angry, and the sight had triggered that ugly black beast in his belly he’d been so diligently drinking quiet all these years. And he’d felt it rise. And he’d yelled, and threatened, and grabbed his sword with the actual intention to use it because Guild rules or no this was a _child_ , bloody 13 at the oldest, and Jee knew what it was like to have no way out and no choice and to need to do anything just to keep on living, and he’d had enough.

He still wondered how in the hell it had worked, but it had. The Guild mob had taken one look at him, glanced to one another and probably decided that they weren’t paid enough to deal with this. They’d dropped the kid and left, shooting Jee glances that ranged from confused to resentful to furious, and he’d been left standing in the middle of a dark alley with both his sword and his anger unsheathed and an unconscious little vagabond bleeding at his feet.

He couldn’t explain any of that to this kid. So he didn’t.

“How old are you?” he asked, standing up from his chair.

The boy narrowed his eyes, pulling the blanket closer around him. “What’s it to you?”

Jee shrugged. “Nothing,” he agreed. “Can you get up?”

“I think so. Why?”

“Because I’m taking you to my room and it’s a bit off Treacle Mine Road. You can’t just stay here. The Guild will know to look for you here.”

He was looking closely, so he didn’t miss the way all remaining color fled the boy’s face at the mention of the Guild. The lad went stiff as he eyed Jee like someone staring down a wild boar, trying to decide whether it was more or less dangerous than the leopard stalking him. 

“You… saved me?” he asked in a whisper.

Jee leaned on the desk and nodded.

The kid closed his eyes and took a moment to think it over.

“Okay,” he whispered.

“Okay,” Jee echoed. 

When he walked over to help him get up, the kid let him.

 

***

 

Turns out he couldn’t quite walk on his own after all.

“Who’s this?” asked Mrs. Punting with alarm when Jee walked into the tenement house with the kid, Zuko, draped over his back and hanging off him like a loose rag doll. 

“Someone who needs help and a place to stay,” Jee barked, moving to the stairs.

She got in his way, arms crossed over her ample bosom and forehead creased in disapproval. “This is not an orphanage, Captain,” she reminded him, looking down her nose at Zuko. “I will not tolerate riff-raff under my roof.”

“You’re tolerating me,” Jee pointed out. 

Her frown turned thunderous.

“Look, Mrs. Punting, it’s only for a few nights until he gets better,” Jee said with a sigh. “I’ll keep him in my room. He’ll be quiet. You won’t even notice he’s there, and I’ll feed him and take care of him myself. You won’t have to do a thing.”

“You’re paying rent for one person, Captain.”

“No, I’m paying for the room. That’s what we agreed on when I took it. There was nothing about how many people can live in it. But if it’s a question of money feel free to scrap my breakfasts, that should make up for your trouble.”

“I don’t like it, Captain.”

“Good thing I’m not even remotely interested in whether you like it or not, then, Mrs. Punting,” Jee growled. “Now kindly step aside. My back’s starting to hurt. Here’s to compensate for your headache,” he added, reaching into his pouch and giving her a dollar. 

She took it, as he knew she would. She stepped aside. As soon as Jee started to climb the creaky stairs up to his room, he heard the agitated click of her heels and the whine of doors, and smiled bitterly. No doubt she was off to complain about him to Mrs. Lockley over tea. 

Let her. Even miserly old bats like her deserved some entertainment in life.

He carried his living, breathing burden all the way up to the fourth floor landing, rummaged around his uniform pockets for a key and let himself in. 

“Right then,” he announced to Zuko and the room at large.

It was too small, he realized. Way too small. Only one bed, one nightstand, one washbasin in a corner by the door, and a bit of floor. It had always been enough for him. It wouldn’t be enough now.

But there was no other choice. The kid couldn’t stay in the Watch house and no one else had even this much room. 

Jee took a break to catch his breath, then made his way to the bed and gently deposited his cargo on it. Slowly, he covered the kid with his threadbare blanket and sat down next to him to check over the dressing on his injured hand.

He’d sleep on the floor tonight.


End file.
